Came upon a hugely entertaining passage in her work “Sorties” about the revolutionary power of words. To a certain extent it provides a source of solace from all the “shit” (and here I am quoting Cixous herself) that we are currently getting from our island’s hegemonic body. Cixous is truly a great writer; frank, lucid, sexy. She has a subtlety of power that is refreshing after the ceaseless masculine body of works that make up the canon. Definitely one of the finest in our time.
– There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself. And everyone knows that to go somewhere else there are routes, signs, “maps” – for an exploration, a trip. – That’s what books are. Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.
And that is where I go. I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go away. Often I go read in a tree. Far from the ground and the shit. I don’t go and read just to read, to forget – No! Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching: somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope. Because I don’t despair: if I myself shout in disgust, if I can’t be alive without being angry, there must be others like me. I don’t know who, but when I am big, I’ll find them and I’ll join them. I don’t yet know where. While waiting, I want to have only my true ancestors for company (and even at that I forgive the Gauls a great deal, thanks to their defeat; they, too, were alienated, deceived, enslaved, it’s true) – my true allies, my true “race.” Not this comical, repulsive species that exercises power in the place where I was born.
And naturally I focused on all the texts in which there is struggle. Warlike texts; rebellious texts. For a long time I read, I lived, in a territory made of spaces taken from all the countries to which I had access through fiction, an antiland (I can never say the word “patrie,” “fatherland,” even if it is provided with an “anti-”) where distinctions of races, classes, and origins would not be put to use without someone’s rebelling. Where there are people who are ready for anything – to live, to die for the sake of ideas that are right and just. And where it was not impossible or pathetic to be generous. I knew, I have always known, what I hated. I located the enemy and all his destructive figures: authority, repression, censorship, the unquenchable thirst for wealth and power. The ceaseless work of death – the constant of evil. But that couldn’t last. Death had to be destroyed. I saw that reality, history, was a series of struggles, without which we would have long ago been dead. And in my mental voyage, I gave great importance to battlefields, conflicts, the confrontation between the forces of death and the forces of life, between wrong ideas and right ideas. Actually, I have always wanted war; I did not believe that changes would be made except through revolutionary movements. I saw the enormity of power every day. Nazism, colonialism, centuries of violent inequality, the massacre of peoples, religious wars. Only one answer – struggle. And without theorizing any of that, of course – I forged through the texts where there was struggle.
